Charlotte Lloyd-Wrigley, the 23-year-old entrepreneur behind Petit Mange in Exeter's St Leonard's suburb, deserves a lot of respect. Asked by the city's Express and Echo whether opening a new restaurant in a recession was wise, she said: "It's always going to be a bad time to open a business. You could say, 'We can't open now because of the recession,' but we have priced for the recession and there are still people going out every night of the week in Exeter."
Exactly. That is precisely the risk-taking spirit that will drag our country out of recession, and the prices in this new venture, replacing a restaurant called The Cat in the Hat, are certainly reasonable. St Leonard's is a calm, relatively affluent part of the city, and meant to be a foodie village in its own right. There is a butcher, fishmonger, bakery, delis and cafés. Petit Mange is pitched as an upper-end food experience compared with these neighbours, which it could yet be. But not without major and obvious improvements.
A split-level bistro, it has awful décor. Where we are sat at least, the work of a local artist, selling at around £300 a pop, is pure splodge on canvas. There is an unpredictable music selection bursting out of a single iPod dock, which tonight plays Brahms, Oasis, Kings of Leon and Kelis in sequence. I would expect only marginally better at Timepiece, the city's biggest club, where Lloyd-Wrigley used to work.
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